He wore it in all his public appearances. From the beginning of the National Front in 1972, Jean-Marie Le Pen, who died this Tuesday at the age of 96, wore a pirate headband.
Interviewed in 1981 by the journalist Daniel Grandclément, he explained that he needed it to hide an “injured eye during an electoral campaign”. “He was still, unfortunately, sick but alive a few years ago and required the wearing of a blindfold because of your terrible spotlight. Since then, unfortunately, it has been replaced by a prosthesis and I no longer have a headband. It’s less romantic but it’s perhaps less frightening,” confided the “Menhir”.
“His eye hangs on the cheekbone”
First vice-president of the National Front from 2011 to 2014, Alain Jamet explained in “Complement of investigation” on France 2, how Jean-Marie Le Pen had lost his eye, during a fight during a meeting.
“We are greeted by a fairly harsh security force who throws us into the benches and makes us fall to the ground. When I wake up, I see Le Pen in the back of the room with his eye bulging. He must have been kicked in the face and his eye is hanging on his cheekbone. He puts it back in the eye socket and with his wife Pierrette goes to the pharmacy to be treated. »
A new version in 2018…
In his memoirs, entitled Son of the nation and published by Muller in 2018, Jean-Marie Le Pen delivered a very different version. He apparently lost the use of his eye while setting up a marquee for a meeting of Jean-Louis Tixier-Vignancourt, the far-right candidate in the 1965 presidential election.
“In Hyères, while wielding the mallet to drive a sardine where the tension ropes are attached, I got a shock in my eye, I had to be hospitalized. Retinal detachment. The tile. I have to leave the caravan before Nice, go back on the train with both eyes blindfolded, leaning on Pierrette’s arm,” he wrote.
The far-right leader would then have consulted Professor Paufique, “a big name” in medicine, in Lyon. “His diagnosis is hopeless: hemorrhage in the vitreous. He operates on me, but I lose the sight of one eye which will remain sensitive to the pain it causes. This is why I will wear a headband, firstly to protect myself against the batteries of spotlights that we face on stage. »
Before returning to the old way
A story he forgot when he was questioned, in 2022? by the host of C8, Jordan de Luxe. “A mallet to drive in a sardine? “, asked the “Menhir”. “Did a comedian tell you that?” » He described being “thrown to the ground by a group and trampled”. “I have a deorbited eye and it’s not the one that was lost oddly enough. I had a traumatic cataract in my eyes and one of the two did not survive,” he said.
He abandoned the blindfold for a glass eye in the early 1980s. A way of changing (a little) the image of the far-right party.
